Staying Happy

By Frances Kolarek —

Frances Kolarek-150 wideExercising our brains, our bodies and maintaining social ties will help us stay happy.

The Brain Game

Once upon a time we sharpened our wits with crossword puzzles, Sudoko and other diversions provided by our daily newspaper. No more. No more.

Wit sharpeneing  has become a business. Patricia Marx, once a writer for Saturday Night Live, has  looked into a number of these enterprises and reported on them in the July 2013 issue of The New Yorker. She calls her essay “Workouts at the brain gym.”

Crisscrossing the country, she subjected herself to one-on-one sessions with experts in wit sharpening and endured hours at the computer playing games and answering tricky questions.

One uninformed CEO of a brain gym disparaged crossword puzzles as “an easy, routine activity.”  He has clearly never tackled a New York Times Saturday crossword edited by Mr. Will Shortz, which can ask for “MIcrowave for a hot dog” which the solver discovers is Frank Zappa. Easy? Routine?

Every expert has his own “measures one can take to minimize, slow down, or even reverse cognitive decline,” she writes. This information should reassure our baby boomers, who, according to a 2011 survey, are more afraid of losing their memory than of death. The brain gyms should prosper.

And  they do. “Staving off dotage isn’t cheap,” Ms. Marx reports. “The amount spent on brain fitness in 2013 was more than a billion dollars.”

I take heart. We old citizens are becoming an accepted segment of society with money to spend when the right product is made available. We are no longer a bunch of old codgers it‘s fair game to make fun of. Hah! That’ll be the day!